The Overton window is shifting on violence. While political violence has, in contemporary American history, been seen as concomitant with extremism, the past year has seen riots become mainstream enough that even many of those who don’t condone violence overtly are making excuses for those who engage in it.
The Overton window, also known as the window of discourse, is a snapshot of the shifting range of socially acceptable political policies at a given time. For instance, while being in favor of gay marriage would have been outside of the Overton window in the early 90s, it’s well within it today. Thus the window of discourse has shifted on this topic over time.
The recent shift on political violence probably began with candidate Donald Trump. Trump’s exhortation at a February 2016 rally to “knock the crap out of” protestors “getting ready to throw [tomatos]” drew criticism from his opponents, but cheers from supporters, as did a 2015 statement on Fox and Friends that the best way to approach ISIS terrorists would be, “to take out their families.”
“When they say they don’t care about their lives,” Trump elaborated, “you have to take out their families.”
Fast forward to last week when the violent Trumper rhetoric that Trump refused to tame, but instead fed into with lies and conspiracy theories about vast election fraud that, if true, would mean the extinction of our democracy, resulted finally in an attempted insurrection at the capitol.
While allegations of congressmen giving assistance to the would be insurrectionists have yet to be thoroughly examined, Trump’s tepid response to protestors–“we love you, you’re very special… We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everyone knows it. Especially the other side. But you have to go home now”–didn’t cut the mustard. Neither did the soft and cowardly responses of many Republican congressmen who still refuse to condemn Trump for fear of losing their next election.
On the other end of the political spectrum, months of protests against police violence which often turned violent were described as “mostly peaceful” by mainstream media sources, most humorously by CNN whose chyron featured the phrase under a scene of part of the city of Kenosha, Wisconsin engulfed in flames.
The unwillingness of many progressive politicians and talking heads to unreservedly condemn the violent elements of these protests is perhaps best illustrated by NPR’s sympathetic August 2020 interview with author Vicky Osterweil about her book In Defense of Looting. In the interview, Osterweil defended property destruction on the grounds that that, “the very basis of property in the U.S. is derived through whiteness and through Black oppression.”
While there have thankfully been many on the right and the left which have condemned violence on their own sides, there is a perceptible shift both in the use of violence and in our willingness to excuse it. But this shouldn’t be. Not only is violence and property destruction inherently immoral and worthy of condemnation, it is leading to increasing polarization which will inevitably arrive at even greater violence and unrest; perhaps even, if the radicals and doomsayers are right, civil war.
To combat this potential future, Americans need to tap into the nonviolent values in our political and religious heritage.
Conservativism as a movement gives prominence to the values of law and order as well as to the worth of every human life–even sticking up for those lives that have yet to be born. Progressivism has a rich tradition of rejecting the violence of war, the death penalty, and, yes, even the violence of riots in the name of worthy causes like civil rights.
Libertarianism shares in the classical liberal tradition of individual rights that conservatism and progressivism likewise emerged from, but it goes even further in its affirmation of the non-aggression principle (NAP) which rejects the initiation of any force whatsoever, making allowances only for self-defense.
Christianity, which has been the dominant religious tradition in America’s history, goes even further, teaching its followers (in Matthew’s fifth chapter in the Holy Bible) to love their enemies, refuse to retaliate when attacked, and pray for those who persecute them.
These founts of America’s social values all agree that peace is preferable to violence, though there is another tradition in our country of unprincipled populist rage and the downgrading of human life. That tradition, the one which we’ve been told doesn’t represent America at her best, is shifting toward the center of acceptable discourse.
It’s time for the Overton window to close on violence.